Wolfsbane

by Patricia Briggs

Aralorn waved her hand in the top of the cooling water and watched the swell dash against her knee. “It seems that Freya was not mistaken in her apprehension. Nevyn had been flattered by my worship-from-afar, something that Freya was too pragmatic ever to do. I think he was a little intimidated by Freya, too.”

  “He attempted you?”

  Aralorn snorted. “You make it sound like I’m a horse. But that’s the general idea. He was teaching me to speak Darranian in Father’s library. I was too stupid—”

  “Young,” corrected Wolf softly.

  “—young and stupid to read his earlier manner correctly. It wasn’t until I examined the incident later that I realized he could have misinterpreted my response to several things he said. He could very well have thought that I was eager for him.”

  Wolf growled, and she hurried on. “At any rate, he tried to kiss me. I stepped on his foot and elbowed him in the stomach. About that time, I heard my sister’s voice in the corridor. Knowing that no good could come from Freya’s finding me with Nevyn—even though nothing happened—I turned into a mouse and escaped out the window and into the gardens.”

  “And how did your Darranian take that?” asked Wolf.

  “Not very well,” admitted Aralorn, smiling wryly. “Obviously, I wasn’t there for the initial shock, but when I came in to dinner, Nevyn left the table. Freya apologized to me for his behavior—all of it. From what she said, I understand that he confessed all to her, which is admirable. He also claimed that it was my evil nature that caused his ‘anomalous’ behavior. She didn’t believe that—although Nevyn probably did—but Freya wasn’t too happy with me anyway.” She smiled wryly. “But Freya wasn’t why I left. I’d seen Nevyn’s face when he saw me: He was afraid of me.”

  Wolf walked around the screen. He wore his human form, but the mask was gone, and his scars with it. It could have been illusion—human magic—but Aralorn sometimes thought that it was the green magic that he drew upon when he chose to look as he had before he’d burned himself. Surely a mere illusion would not seem so real; but then, maybe she was prejudiced in favor of green magic.

  The unscarred face he wore was almost too beautiful for a man, without being unmasculine in the least. High cheekbones, square jaw, night-dark hair: His father had left his mark upon his son’s face as surely as he had his soul.

  She would never let him see the touch of revulsion that she felt for that face, so close to the one his father wore. She knew that he wore it now in an attempt to be vulnerable before her, so that she could read his emotions better, for the scars that usually covered his face were too extensive to allow for much expression.

  “It hurt you,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  Aralorn shook her head. “I’ve grown up since then and learned a thing or two along the way. I’ve stayed away from Lambshold for my sister’s sake, and, I think, for my father’s as well. He loves—loved—Nevyn like another son. My presence could only have divided this family. And Nevyn . . . Nevyn came to us broken. One of us had to leave, and it was easier for me.” She thought a moment. “Actually, looking back, it’s rather amusing to think that someone thought I was an evil seductress. It’s not a role often taken by folks who look like I do.”

  Although his lips never moved, his smile warmed his habitually cold eyes. “Evil, no,” he commented, his gaze drifting from her face.

  “Are you implying something?” she asked archly, not at all displeased. She knew she was plain, and her feminine attractions were not enhanced by the muscles and scars of mercenary life—but it didn’t seem to bother Wolf.

  “Who, me?” he murmured, kneeling beside the bath. He pressed a soft kiss on her forehead, then allowed his lips to trail a path along her eyebrow and over her cheekbone. Pausing at the corner of her mouth, he nibbled gently.

  “You could seduce a glacier,” commented Aralorn, somewhat unsteadily. She shivered when the puff of air released by his hushed laugh brushed her passion-sensitive lips.

  “Why, thank you,” he replied. “But I’ve never tried that.”

  “I missed you,” she said softly.

  He touched her forehead with his own and closed his eyes. Under her hand, his neck knotted with tension that had nothing, she thought, to do with the passion of a moment before.

  “Help me here, love,” she said, scooting up in the tub until she was sitting upright. “What’s wrong?”

  He pulled back, his eyes twin golden jewels that sparkled with the lights of the candles that lit the room. She couldn’t read the emotion that roiled behind the glittering amber, and she doubted Wolf could tell her what it was if he wanted to. He reacted to the unknown the same way a wild animal would—safety lay in knowledge and control; the unknown held only destruction. Falling in love had been much harder on him than it had been on her.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you again,” she said. “But I think I had better. Why did you leave?”

  Wolf drew in a breath and looked at the privacy screen as if it were a detailed work of art rather than the mundane piece of furniture it was. One of his hands was still on Aralorn’s shoulder, but he seemed to have forgotten about it.

  “It’s all right,” said Aralorn finally, sitting up and pulling her legs until she could link her arms around them. “You don’t—”

  “It is not all right,” he bit out hoarsely, tightening his grip on her shoulder with bruising force. He twisted back to face her, and his kneeling posture became the crouch of a cornered beast. “I . . . Plague it!”

  Aralorn scarcely had time to realize that her cooling bathwater had become scalding hot before Wolf pulled her out dripping like a fish onto the cold stone floor. She took the time to snatch the bath sheet and wrap it around her twice before joining Wolf near the tub, watching as the water erupted into clouds of billowing steam. After a moment, she opened the window shutters to disperse the fog in the room.

  “I could have burned you,” he said, looking away from the empty tub, his voice too quiet.

  “So you could have.” Aralorn pursed her lips, and wondered how to handle this new twist in their relationship.

  She knew him well enough to know that heating the water hadn’t been a bizarre practical joke: He had a sense of humor, but it didn’t lend itself to endangering people. It meant that his magic was acting without his knowledge—sternly, she repressed the tingle of fear that trickled over her. Unlike Aralorn, his magic, human or green, was much better than the average hedgewitch’s: But her fear would hurt him more surely than a knife in his throat.

  “I should have told you before,” he said without looking at her. “I thought it was just my imagination when things first started happening around me. They were little things. A vase falling off a table or a candle lighting itself.” He stopped speaking and drew in his breath.

  When he spoke again, his ruined voice crackled with the effort of his suppressed emotion. “I wish I had never discovered I could work green magic as well as the human variety. It was bad enough before, when I was some sort of freak who couldn’t control the power of the magic I could summon. At least then it only came when I called. Ever since I started using green magic, I’ve been losing control. It tugs me around as if I were a dog, and it held my leash. It would be better for you if I left and never came back.”

  As he spoke the last words, he made a swift gesture, and the steam clouds disappeared from the room. Aralorn stepped in front of him, so he had to look at her.

  Smiling sweetly, she reached up to touch his face with both hands. “You leave, and I’ll follow you to Deathsgate and back,” she said pleasantly. “Don’t think I can’t.”

  His hands covered hers rather fiercely.

  “Gods,” he said, closing his eyes. Aralorn couldn’t tell if it was a curse or a prayer.

  “Green magic has a personality of its own,” she said softly. “One of the elders who taught me likened it to a willful child. It responds better to coaxing than force.”

  Yellow eyes slitted open. “Do you not have to call
your magic? Just as any human mage would do?”

  “Yes,” agreed Aralorn, though reluctantly. She hated it when he shot down her attempts to make him feel better.

  Wolf grunted. “A human mage is limited by the amount of pure, unformed magic he can summon and the time he can hold it to his spell. The magic you call is already a part of the pattern of the world, so you have to respect that limit. I tell you that this magic”—he spat the word out—“comes when it wills. If you are not frightened by that, you should be. Remember that my magic is not limited except by my will. This does not heed my will at all. I cannot control it, I cannot stop it.”

  Aralorn thought about that for a moment before a cat-in-the-milk-barn smile crossed her face. “I do so hate being bored. You always manage to have the most interesting problems.”

  She caught him off guard and surprised a rusty laugh out of him.

  “Come,” she said briskly, “help me dry off, and we’ll eat. My mother’s people live near here—maybe they can help. We’ll stop there before we go back to Sianim.”

  THREE

  Aralorn walked to the great hall, with Wolf ghosting beside her, once more in lupine form. When she’d told him he didn’t have to accompany her, he had merely given her a look and waited for her to open the door. When he wanted to, the man could say more with a look than most people managed with a whole speech.

  She’d searched through the clothing still in her closet, trying to find a long-sleeved dress that would cover the scars on her arms. The dresses were all in beautiful condition (many having never been worn), but the fashions of ten years ago had tight sleeves that she could no longer fit into thanks to a decade of weapons drills. She’d settled for a narrow-skirted, short-sleeved dress and ignored the scars.

  The room was crowded, and for a moment she didn’t recognize anyone there. Ten years had made changes. Some of the crowd were tenant farmers and gentry who held their manors in fief to her father; but from the number of very tall, blond people in the room, Aralorn thought most of them were her family, grown up now from the ragtag bunch of children she remembered.

  Wolf received some odd looks, but no one asked about him. It seemed that mercenaries would be allowed their eccentricities.

  She smiled and nodded as she waded through the crowd, knowing from experience that the names would sort themselves out eventually. Usually, she was better at mingling and chatting, but this wasn’t just work, and the black curtain that hung in the far corner of the room held too much of her attention.

  In the alcove behind the curtain, her father’s body was laid out in state—awaiting the customary solitary visits of his mourners. Visits where the departed spirit could be wished peacefully on his way, old quarrels could be put aside, and daughters could greet their fathers for the first time in a decade.

  She’d seen him now and again, the last time at the coronation of the new Rethian king. But I was working, and he never recognized me under the guises I wore.

  “Aralorn!” exclaimed a man’s voice somewhere behind her.

  Aralorn gave herself an instant to collect her scattered thoughts before she turned.

  The young man slipping rapidly through the crowd wasn’t immediately identifiable, though his height and his golden hair proclaimed him one of her brothers. She hesitated for a moment, but realized from his age and the walnut-stained color of his eyes who he had to be—the only other boy near his age had blue eyes. When she searched his features she could see the twelve-year-old boy she’d known.

  “Correy,” she said warmly, as he came up to her.

  Wordlessly, he opened his arms. She wrapped her arms around him and returned his hug. The top of her head was well short of his shoulders in spite of the torturously high heels on her shoes.

  “You shrank,” he commented, pulling away to reveal a twinkle in his dark brown eyes.

  She stepped back so she wouldn’t strain her neck looking at him. “Back less than a day, and already I’ve been insulted twice for my size. You should have more respect for your elders, boy.”

  “Correy—” A female voice broke into the conversation from somewhere over Aralorn’s left shoulder. “Mother’s looking for you. She says you forgot to get something that she needed for something else, I forget what. I can’t believe that you are wearing a sword; Mother will pitch a fit when she sees that you’re wearing a weapon to Father’s wake.” A tall, exquisitely groomed woman of somewhere around thirteen or so tripped past Aralorn without so much as a glance and stopped at Correy’s side.

  Correy rolled his eyes, looking for a moment much more like a boy of twelve than a grown man. With a smile for Aralorn, he reached out a brotherly arm and snagged the immaculately clad girl around the neck and pulled her to his side. “You won’t recognize this one, Aralorn, as she was only four when you left. Lin has set herself up as the mistress of propriety at Lambshold. She wants to go to court and meet the king. I think she envisions him falling desperately in love with her.”

  The girl, only inches shorter than her brother, struggled out of his hold and glared at him. “You think you’re so smart, Correy—but you don’t even know that you shouldn’t wear swords at a formal gathering. Mother’s going to skin you alive.”

  Correy smiled, ignoring her wrath. “I meant to tell you that black looks exceptionally well with your hair.”

  “You really think so?” Lin asked anxiously, suddenly willing to listen to her brother’s previously dismissed judgment.

  “I wouldn’t say so else, Lin,” he said with obvious affection.

  She kissed his cheek and drifted off, taking little notice of her long-lost sister.

  “I apologize for her rudeness ...” began Correy, but Aralorn smiled and shook her head.

  “I was fourteen once, myself.”

  He smiled and glanced down casually at Wolf, but when he met the solemn yellow gaze, he started. “Allyn’s toadflax , Aralorn, Mother said you’d brought your pet, but she didn’t say he was a wolf.”

  He knelt to get a better view, careful not to crowd too close. “I haven’t seen many black wolves.”

  “I found him in the Northlands,” said Aralorn. “He was caught in an old trap. By the time he was healed, he’d gotten used to me. He still comes and goes as he pleases. I didn’t know he’d accompanied me here until he showed up in the courtyard.”

  “Hey, lad,” crooned Correy, cautiously extending his hand until he touched the thick ruff around the wolf’s throat.

  “You don’t have to be quite so careful. He’s never bitten anyone yet . . . at least not for petting him.”

  There were too many people in the room for her to worry about the purposeful steps that approached her from behind, but she did anyway. Hostility always had that effect on her.

  The man striding toward them was dark-haired and dark-eyed, the epitome of a Darranian lord. Not as handsome as Wolf—who was half Darranian and looked it—and less dangerous-looking, though he had something of Wolf’s grace when he moved. Nevyn, she thought with a touch of resignation accompanying her nervousness.

  He stopped in front of her, close enough that he was looking down, forcing her to look up to meet his eyes. “You profane this gathering by your presence, shapeshifter.”

  “Nevyn,” she greeted him courteously.

  From the corner of her eye, she noticed Wolf pull away from Correy and slink toward Nevyn, his lips curled back from his fangs.

  “Wolf, no,” she said firmly, hoping he would listen.

  Yellow eyes gleamed at her, but the snarl disappeared as he trotted back to her side.

  When she was certain Wolf was not going to do anything rash, Aralorn turned her attention back to Nevyn; but the distraction had done her good—and that might have been Wolf’s intention all along. He was a subtle beast. Prepared now, she examined the Darranian sorcerer. The years had been kind to him, broadening his shoulders and softening his mouth. The shy anxiety that had plagued him had faded, leaving behind an intense, handsome man who looked prepa
red to defend his family from her.

  “I am truly sorry you feel that way,” she said. “But the Lyon is my father, and I will stay for his burial. For his sake, I bid you peace. If you feel it necessary, perhaps we could discuss this in a less public forum.”

  “She’s right, husband,” said a firm voice, and a woman, slightly taller than Nevyn, materialized to Aralorn’s left. In Freya, Lin’s promise of beauty was fulfilled. Thick red-gold hair hung in glorious splendor to her slender hips. Her belly was gently rounded with pregnancy, but that robbed her figure of none of its grace. The dark blue eyes that glanced a quick apology at Aralorn were large and tilted. “This is neither the time nor the place for this conversation.”

  “Freya,” said Aralorn, smiling, “it’s good to see you again.”

  Mischievousness lit the younger woman’s smile as she patted her husband’s arm before she left him to hug Aralorn. “Don’t stay away so long next time, Featherweight. I missed you.”

  Aralorn laughed, grateful for the change of topic. “I missed you, too, Puff.”

  Correy gave a crack of laughter. “I’d forgotten that name. None of the youngsters got nicknames once you’d gone.”

  “Maybe,” said Freya, her eyes twinkling as she folded her arms and puffed out her cheeks in the manner that had given her the once-hated appellation, “I didn’t miss everything about your absence.”

  “If I remember Irrenna’s letters correctly, your child is due this spring, right?” asked Aralorn.

  Freya nodded and started to say more, but Irrenna, emerging from whatever social emergency had been keeping her at a distant corner of the room, called Aralorn’s name.

  Hurrying forward, Irrenna pressed a kiss on Aralorn’s cheek. “Come, dear, the alcove is empty, so you can pay your respects to your father.”

  Although she knew the smile on her face didn’t change, Aralorn felt a cold chill of grief. “Yes, Irrenna. Thank you.”

  She followed her stepmother’s graceful form through the crowd. They paused here and there for introductions—Irrenna had taken refuge from her grief in the social amenities called for at any large gathering.